SUPERCUT – Project 1 brings together the practices of Jacinta Giles, Warwick Gow, CJ Anderson, Kirsty Lee, Kailum Graves and Kitten Xaos in an exploration of representation and introspective reflection.
Jacinta Giles is a photographic artist based in Meanjin (Brisbane). In finding new ways to compose, inhabit, and create encounters with the televisual, Giles’s experimental photographic practice challenges our habitual relationship with this seductive and invasive mode of representation. Through revealing television’s narrative gestures, textural layers, and shifting velocities, her work brings to light entirely new structures of digital matter—materialising our blind spots to the televisual’s fleeting contingency and its unique way of mediating our existence. As the impact of the televisual on the way we make sense predominantly goes unnoticed, Giles’s photographs offer an alternative pathway for seeing digital embodiment as part of our contemporary condition. Giles has a doctorate from the Queensland College of Art, Griffith University, and has exhibited in Australia, Canada, Europe, the United Kingdom, South America, and the United States.
Warwick Gow is a Sunshine Coast based photographer who uses the portrait to place local fringe culture within arm’s length of the mainstream. Exploring notions of identity and self by hijacking the thin veil of commercialism and elegantly smashes it against DIY ethics, Warwick’s crusty and colourful work uses portraits, zines and installation art to destabilize notions of representation.
CJ Anderson grew up around manufacturing and has been involved in making from birth. Studying at Queensland College of Art, Gold Coast. Since graduating, the Gold Coast native has made waves on the national and international design scene with his furniture. Anderson’s work explores the artist’s relationship with, and emotions attached to, objects that have informed his lived experience. Starting with familiar materials such as stainless steel tubular forms and experimenting with lesser known materials such as memory foam, fabric, stone and timber, his work seeks to find a balance between form, function and materiality. Inviting people to experience a sense of intrigue, to explore the work on a deep level and find their own meaning.
Kirsty Lee is an Australian interdisciplinary artist who works across video, performance and collaborative practices. Her background in dance positions the body at the forefront of her work, but is stripped back to gestural and single syllable action. Choreographed within the edit, these gif timed videos are designed to challenge our viewing experience. Her digital work has recently featured with Kaldor Public Art, Australian Dance Theatre, Dancehouse, LENS GC, Gaffa Gallery, LoosenArt.
Kailum Graves is an artist and binary archivist critically obsessed with the artifactual digital object. Through artworks, writing, and curatorial projects he investigates the hidden and invisible structures of power. He does this by contemplating themes as diverse as economic inequality, the algorithmic nature of digital photography, the bombardment of media imagery, the politics of fear and the threat of otherness, the shifting boundaries between bodies and technologies, photographic manipulation and its representation of reality, and celebrity culture. While this interest stems from very personal experience and is a way for him to begin to understand, accept, and deal with his own post-traumatic stress disorder, angst, anxiety, and depression, his work addresses ideas, metaphors, images, themes, (dark) humour, feelings, and symbols which are universally shared (the nuances of human existence).
Kitten Xaos is a cross-disciplinary artist living and making in Meanjin. They draw on the nature of materials to create a meaningful synergy of material and concept. Their work with media including sculpture, jewellery, drawing, and installation investigates themes of self, identity, the body, ritual and the other. They draw inspiration from theories including intersectional feminism and critical post-humanism to encourage empathy in their audience.
Image: Jacinta Giles / False Continuity (Superhero) 2022 / photographic collage / dimensions variable / © Jacinta Giles
